Workshop 3: Teaching Poetry

In Workshop 3, we see two master teachers—Vivian Johnson, who teaches
eighth grade in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and Jack Wilde, a fifth-grade
teacher from Hanover, New Hampshire—help their students develop
as readers and writers of poetry.

The workshop begins midway through Vivian Johnson's five-week poetry
unit as she introduces a lesson on line breaks to her students. After
the class analyzes several models that exemplify the power of line breaks,
the students apply what they have learned to their own writing and share
their work with each other.

Like Vivian, Jack Wilde is using a published poem to teach his fifth-grade
students about writing poetry. After the students read and analyze the
poem, Jack gives them a topic and has them practice writing stanzas modeled
on the exemplar to combine into a class poem. The children share their
writing, and then Jack leads them in a discussion of how they might apply
what they have learned from this exercise to writing their own poetry.

In addition to classroom segments, the workshop features excerpts from
a conversation between Jack and Vivian and from an interview with Tom
Romano, author of Clearing the Way: Working With Teenage Writers.